Wednesday, July 19, 2017

Tintri, a networking start-up from Silicon Valley, made its initial public offering (IPO) on June 30,2017 and its shares are now trading on NASDAQ under the symbol 'TNTR'. The IPO raised approximately $60 million for the Mountain View, California-based company – a lukewarm Wall Street response considering earlier speculation that the shares might debut in the range of $10.50 to $12.50. Many expected the IPO to occur at the start of last week and at the higher price range. It was not clear why the IPO was delayed by a few days, but the lower price must have caused consternation for early investors and employees. Post IPO, Tintri, which means 'lightning' in the Irish language, currently has a market capitalisation value of about $225 million.

Tintri was founded in 2008 by Kieran Hearty, who had previously led engineering at VMware, and Mark Grittier, who had previously worked on software engineering at Sun Microsystems. The first products were introduced nearly 3 years later in March 2011. In August 2015, Tintri raised a $125 million Series F funding round led by Silver Lake Craftwork and included existing investors Insight Venture Partners, Light speed Ventures, Menlo Ventures and NEA. In December 2016, Charles Giancarlo, the former CTO of Cisco Systems, joined the Tintri board.

Tintri prides itself of having developed an enterprise cloud platform with a 'Lego-like' design that allows for every storage action at the individual virtual machine level. The value proposition is simple: scale the enterprise cloud from terabytes of storage to multiple petabytes as efficiently as possible. The Tintri CONNECT web services architecture use the 'Lego' building-block approach predicated on REST APIs and VM and container level abstraction. The frameworks runs applications on resource pools that span VMware, Citrix,Microsoft and OpenStack. This supports a DevOps model, where resource can be spun up or torn down on-demand, including via automated bots or modern interfaces such as Slack or Amazon's Alexa. To deliver this, Tintri's platform integrates cloud management software, web services and a range of all-flash storage systems.

A key ingredient is a virtualisation-aware file system that allows an organisation to view, manage and analyse application performance and quality of service. In a sense, it enables a private version of a public cloud. Use cases include server virtualisation, virtual desktop infrastructure, or VDI, disaster recovery and data protection, and development operations, or DevOps. Tintri says it has an advantage because innovation in storage has lagged and lacked granular level operation at the VM and container level. Marquee customers include AMD, F5 Networks, GE, NEC, NTT, MillerCoors and Time Warner.

Key metrics on Tintri:

The company has more than 575 employees, over 1,300 customers, including 21 of the Fortune 100, 9 of the 16 largest U.S. federal government agencies and multiple cloud service provider customers. In 2015, it had revenue of $49.8 million, a net loss of $69.7 million, and gross margin of 56%; for 2016, revenue was $86.0 million, net loss $101.0 million and gross margin 63%; for 2017 its revenue was $125.1 million, net loss $105.8 million and gross margin of $65%. Accumulated deficit as of January 31, 2017 was $338.7 million.

A wide field of competitors

In enterprise networking, it is safe to say that every vendor has been moving toward cloud or hybrid cloud solutions for some time. For Tintri, though it may have been early to foresee the need for enterprises to rapidly scale their storage in a cloud-friendly way, there is now strong competition from both the larger, multinational vendors and a wave of nimble competitors from both the software and storage fields. Key competitors include the following.

Nutanix

Nutanix offers hyperconverged appliances combining compute, storage and networking. This is a different approach to software-defined storage that appeals in many similar use cases. For a size comparison with Tintri, Nutanix recently reported Q1 2017 revenue of $191.8 million, up 67% year-over-year.

Dell EMC

Dell EMC, which can be considered the king of storage and file management, with the newly combined company pulling together the full picture of hybrid enterprise cloud IT, including security.

NetApp

NetApp has been delivering enterprise storage and file management solutions since 1992. In December 2016, NetApp agreed to acquire SolidFire for $870 million in cash, significantly more than the current market capitalisation of Trintri. SolidFire specialised in all-flash storage systems for next-generation data centres. Its distributed, self-healing, webscale architecture also promise seamless scalability, white box economics, and radically simple management. This enables customers to accelerate third platform use cases and webscale economics. SolidFire was recognised as an active leader in the cloud community with extensive integrated storage management capabilities with OpenStack, VMware, and other cloud frameworks.

HPE

In May 2017, Hewlett Packard Enterprise agreed to acquire Nimble Storage, a supplier of predictive all-flash and hybrid-flash storage solutions, for $12.50 per share in cash, representing a net cash purchase price at closing of $1.0 billion. In addition to the purchase price, HPE also agreed to assume or pay out Nimble's $200 million in unvested equity awards. Nimble offers midrange flash storage solutions featuring an intelligent, predictive analytics engine that assesses performance issues across the full data path, from apps to the array. In addition, Nimble has recently introduced multi-cloud storage services that combine the best of on-premises and public cloud storage capabilities for hybrid IT deployments. Nimble, which is based in San Jose, California, was founded in 2007 and has approximately 1,300 employees worldwide. The company delivered revenue of $402 million in its most recent fiscal year, up 25 percent year over year.

Hitachi Data Systems

HDS, which traces its roots back to Itel, an early player in the mainframe market, is also based in Silicon Valley. The company offers increasingly sophisticated file management technologies.

IBM

In 2015, IBM announced plans to invest $1 billion over the next five years to develop next-generation technologies for software-defined storage. IBM intends to focus this investment on R&D of new cloud storage software, object storage and open standard technologies including OpenStack. The IBM Spectrum Storage portfolio, which already incorporates more than 700 patents held by the company, will be directed toward helping enterprises transform to a hybrid cloud.

VMware

In 2013, VMware acquired Virsto Software, a start-up offering software for optimising storage performance and utilization in virtual environments. Virsto, which was founded in 2007 and was based in Sunnyvale, California, developed a storage hypervisor that 'does for storage what the server hypervisor did for servers'.

Pure Storage

Last month, Pure Storage, which is known for its all-flash arrays, unveiled its vision for multi-cloud data management. This system also promises support for VMware VVOLs, Microsoft ODX, Docker Persistent Containers, native data protection integration with public cloud providers, and pre-validated FlashStack.

BT unit Openreach has called for greater industry and political collaboration to support the construction of a large-scale, full-fibre broadband network that could help strengthen UK competitiveness and its position as a leading digital economy in the G20 group of countries.

Openreach provides phone and broadband infrastructure to around 30 million UK homes and businesses via more than 580 communications provider customers, and has launched a consultation with retail providers and is engaging with government and the regulator Ofcom to identify locations with widespread demand for a large-scale, full fibre, or FTTP, network capable of delivering more reliable service and gigabit speeds.

Openreach will also assess the potential market benefits of implementing such a major infrastructure deployment and seek support for the key enablers required to make a commercial investment case viable.

4. Agreement on the right method for sharing the costs of FTTP investment.

5. A new legal and regulatory environment that will encourage investment.

Openreach noted that, drawing on BT's R&D teams at its labs in Martlesham Heath in Suffolk, it recently became the first company to demonstrate 100 Gbit/s speeds utilising its existing FTTP infrastructure, illustrating the potential to meet future consumer and business bandwidth demands.

Openreach stated that it is currently working towards making ultra-fast speeds of more than 100 Mbit/s available to 12 million UK homes and businesses by the end of 2020 employing a mixture of technologies. However, it is also interested in exploring the conditions that could allow it to invest in more full-fibre infrastructure.

Over the last decade, Openreach noted that it has invested more than GBP 11 billion in its network and currently manages more than 158 million km of cable extending from Scotland to Cornwall and from Wales to the east coast.

Commenting on the initiative, Clive Selley, chief executive of Openreach, said, "With the right conditions I believe Openreach could make FTTP available to as many as 10 million homes and businesses by the mid-2020s, but it needs to understand if there is sufficient demand to justify the roll-out and support for the enablers needed to build a viable business case… that includes removing barriers to investment and incentivising those… prepared to take a commercial risk".

ADTRAN, a provider of next-generation open networking solutions, announced the commencement of lab testing of the latest developments for the G.fast standard, 212 MHz and coordinated dynamic time allocation (cDTA), in partnership with Germany-based global telco Deutsche Telekom (DT), serving around 165 million mobile customers, 28,5 million fixed-network lines and 18,5 million broadband lines.

ADTRAN stated that DT is currently evaluating these ultra-broadband technologies using fibre-to-the-building (FTTB) deployment models that allow the use of existing cable infrastructure within the home. This can support the rapid deployment of ultra-fast and gigabit broadband services with less disruption. The low cost per-subscriber connection will also support the European Commission's Gigabit Society objectives.

ADTRAN noted that it has demonstrated the new 212 MHz G.fast standard, which doubles the usable spectrum and can enable service providers to deliver gigabit rates over a single copper pair, thereby enabling fibre-like service to the customer premise. The company added that unlike with cable systems, the bandwidth of G.fast is dedicated and available for each customer.

The tests, leveraging what ADTRAN claims is the first commercially available 212 MHz DPU, also demonstrated the second phase of DTA. cDTA, which extends the existing iDTA feature to improve G.fast upstream performance by a claimed four to five-fold by dynamically balancing upstream and downstream capacity to match residential traffic patterns in real-time. The cDTA feature can also be applied to existing phone wiring to address most residential and commercial premises scenarios.

* In May, ADTRAN announced that it was conducting public demonstration of the ITU-T's latest G.fast advances, 212 MHz and coordinated dynamic time allocation (cDTA), at the G.fast Summit 2017 in Paris.

* At the G.fast Summit, ADTRAN demonstrated its new 212 MHz G.fast standard, which doubles the usable spectrum and enables the delivery of gigabit rates over a single copper pair. The company noted that it had also extended its reverse power feature set to the new solution to simplify sourcing of local power.

Coriant announced that it has partnered with Stockholm Internet eXchange (STHIX), a neutral Internet Exchange focused on delivering IXP services to enhance the scalability, flexibility and efficiency of STHIX's metro network to support increasing traffic demands of its end-user ISP customers and over 100 connected networks.

Following the recent deployment of the Coriant Groove G30 Network Disaggregation Platform, STHIX is able to quickly scale capacity to meet the increasingly short demand cycles of its customers.

The Coriant Groove G30 solution is an advanced 1 RU modular open transport solution targeting cloud, data centre and IXP networks that can be configured as a muxponder terminal solution and as an Open Line System (OLS) optical layer solution. Designed for interconnectivity applications, the disaggregated Groove G30 delivers high density together with flexibility and low power consumption.

Coriant stated that the Groove G30 metro deployment for STHIX utilises 200 Gbit/s coherent optical transmission and supports a range of end-user services, including 100 Gbit/s client-side services that can be deployed quickly and cost-efficiently. The optical transport solution enables STHIX to enhance its peering platform, which is currently distributed across Stockholm's six major data centres and Gothenburg's main data centre. The platform is due to be extended to main data centres in Copenhagen this summer.

Stockholm Internet eXchange aims to provide reliable high speed interconnectivity between Internet service providers in Scandinavia, specifically Stockholm, Gothenburg and Copenhagen. STHIX is a neutral, independent that provides members with interconnection ports at speeds from 100 Mbit/s up to single or multiple 100 Gbit/s ports

Juniper Networks has named Bikash Koley as chief technology officer (CTO), reporting to chief executive officer Rami Rahim, with responsibility for charting Juniper's technology strategy and leading and executing several of the company's critical technology innovations, including Contrail and AppFormix.

Mr. Koley, who is expected to join Juniper in August 2017, has extensive experience in both IP and optical domains and in designing and operating large scale networks.

Mr. Koley is currently serving as a distinguished engineer and the head of network architecture, engineering and planning at Google. He is an expert in the areas of software-defined networking (SDN), packet and optical network integration, warehouse-scale computing and large-scale data centre interconnection.

While with Google, Bikash Koley designed, built and operated Google's production network infrastructure, spanning data centre, backbone(s), optical and the content edge. His team also oversaw the company's SDN evolution, network technology strategy and networking research and innovation, enabling ubiquitous programmability and high reliability.

Prior to Google, Mr. Koley served as the CTO of Qstreams Networks, a company he co-founded. He also spent a number of years with Ciena in a range of technical roles related to the development of DWDM and Ethernet technologies.

Mr. Koley has published numerous research papers and has been awarded 18 patents related to networking technologies. He holds a Bachelors in Technology for Electronics and Communications Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India, and MS and PhD degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Maryland at College Park.

In the new Optical Transport 5-year Forecast Report from Dell'Oro Group, the WDM market revenue is forecast to grow to $14 billion by 2021, driven by the demand for 100+ Gbit/s coherent wavelengths, while the total optical transport equipment market, including WDM, multi-service multiplexers and optical switches, is projected to reach $15 billion.

Highlights from Dell'Oro's latest optical transport report include:

1. Demand for WDM metro equipment is expected to outpace that for DWDM long haul over the next five years, with the average annualised revenue growth rate over the period for WDM metro equipment projected to be approximately three-times that for DWDM long haul.

2. 100+ Gbit/s coherent wavelengths will constitute approximately 90% of the overall WDM equipment market in terms of revenue by 2021.

Commenting on the report, Jimmy Yu, VP at Dell'Oro Group, said, "Demand for coherent wavelengths running at speeds of 100 Gbit/s and higher is expected to grow at a solid pace for the next five years… specifically, I predict a large ramp in demand for 200 Gbit/s coherent wavelengths and forecast shipments of these line cards to grow at an 85% compounded annual growth rate".

Calix announced that Logic, a major service provider in the Caribbean, has selected the Calix Marketing Cloud (CMC) and Support Cloud (CSC) solutions to enhance its existing GigaCenter deployments and deliver an enhanced subscriber experience in the Cayman Islands.

Calix stated that Logic is applying behavioural analytics and business intelligence insights provided by the two Calix Cloud services with the aim of optimising each subscriber interaction. CMC allows Logic to accurately target subscribers with the right service for their needs, while CSC helps it to provide more effective customer support by using automation and analytics to enhance its ability to rapidly identify customer issues.

Utilising Calix Cloud, Logic gains access to the data, insights and automation required to improve service quality for its subscribers, while also significantly improving operational efficiency.

Designed for broadband providers, CMC works by automating the collection, analysis and presentation of subscriber behaviour data and providing continuous access to data-driven subscriber insights. Logic's marketing team will use CMC's intuitive dashboards to gain a better understanding of subscribers' online usage patterns, such as heavy concurrent media streaming and new IoT devices in the connected home, to help improve its marketing and service creation.

The CMC dashboards provide the necessary information to allow Logic to develop specific service offerings to support subscriber retention and upselling. CMC also features a social channel heatmap that can track the social platform preferences of subscribers and help with the creation of marketing programs.

In addition, longstanding Calix Consumer Connect Plus customer Logic is leveraging CSC's instrumentation-aware automation and analytics to improve efficiency. CSC is designed to enable Logic's help desk customer service staff to resolve complicated, connected home issues, including WiFi connectivity, from a single dashboard offering a view of the subscriber's home network.

* Calix released the CMC cloud solution in April this year. CMC features behavioural filters designed to allow the creation of actionable lists of target subscribers extracted directly from back-office systems, which can then loaded into marketing campaigns.

Netronome has appointed Dr. Nils Rix as senior vice president of sales.

Previously, Dr. Rix was vice president of sales and technical sales, as well as Market Area CTO with Alcatel-Lucent EMEA. He previously held executive positions at Bharti Airtel Ltd. and Ericsson AB. He studied economics and applied physics at Christian-Albrechts-University in Kiel and the University of Washington in Seattle and holds a Ph.D. from Christian-Albrechts-University.